“I, a Jew”: Borges, Nazism, and the Shoah

Abstract

Es infan til impacientarse; la misericordia de Hitler es ecumenica; en breve (si no lo estorban los vendepatrias y las judios) gozaremos de todos las beneficias de la tortura, de la sodomia, del estupro y de las ejecuciones en masa.It is childish to be impatient; Hitler's mercy is ecumenical; in short (if the traitors and Jews don't disrupt him) we will enjoy all the benefits of torture, sodomy, rape, and mass executions.Jorge Luis 1941, published December 1941CREATING BORGESWould have been Borges without World War II and the Holocaust? Let me be provocative: without the confluence of Hitler, the collapse of the Western order as he knew it, the national-fascist revolution in his own Argentina, and the torture, sodomy, rape, and mass executions, the so-so poet and sharp-tongued essayist would not have become Borges, the maker of the ficciones that earned him international fameand indeed, the subject of this JQR forum. In fact: I'd like to propose that without the intervention of what he would call lo hebreo, the process of creating Borges, the renovator of representation, might not have happened.Some Borgistas might shake their heads in doubt, but permit me to run with the idea. I'll follow a fourfold path: first, the personal experience of the supposedly impersonal author; second, the politics of the allegedly apolitical writer; third, the unreal fictions of the all too real fabulist; and finally, the censored reception of the hater of censorship.THE PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OF THE IMPERSONAL AUTHORBorges didn't spring into being fully formed. The author is informed by a wealth of life experience. Absurdly, the notion that somehow robotically shunned personal circumstance or didn't live in reality is a long-held dogma. Jaime Alazraki, one of the writer's most assiduous commentators (and one of the first students of the Kabbalah in Borges), stated it bluntly when he decreed: has avoided human experience.1The extreme version of this notion served as narrative fodder for the German novelist Gerhard Kopf. In his novel Bor geo gibt eo nicht (There is no 1992), it turns out that an actor has impersonated all along; the man never existed, never penned a single line. Alazraki and Kopf both fell into the same artfully dug trap: they confused a fictional practice that refused to replicate personal circumstance with the actual avoidance of human experience. The confusion reveals less about than about his glossators' difficulties relating to his innovative confrontation with reality.The making of the began in earnest in Geneva, during and after World War I. Like other semi-moneyed Argentine families of the time, the family made a trip to Europe to soak up culture, and in their case, to get an operation to help Borges's father's ailing eyes. In Geneva, Jorge Luis, aka Georgie, was immersed in painful and enriching otherness. The languages spoken, French, Latin, and German, were not his own; the Swiss, he later recalled, were standoffish; close friends, Maurice Abramowicz and Simon Jichlinski, were both Jews of Polish origin; and the First World War was never far away, affecting even Switzerland, so skilled at keeping the devil beyond the Alps.Jewishness, as perceived it, swirled around each of these realities. He enthusiastically claimed to share the heritage of his adolescent buddies; he read, mostly in German, Heinrich Heme, Franz Kafka, Gustav Meyrink, author of the Kabbalah-saturated novel Der Golem, along with other works on Jewish mysticism, and was moved by the biblically imagistic German Expressionists. felt a sense of being both inside and outside Western culture, a difficult but fruitful position he later recommended for Latin Americans. He also was moved by the Expressionist poets, who captured the mass destruction of the war and were the only ones for whom protest against the atrocities, said, trumped typical Teutonic philosophical coolness or mere formal experimentation. …